Editor’s note: I loved the outraged tone in this post! I’m very much like that about my own peeves. (I won’t get started.) I also love how Angelika isn’t just outraged; she also teaches. I’ll never see spinning the same way. Enjoy!
Enchanted Conversation recently republished an older post by Elizabeth Creith, a highly informative article on flax that is aptly entitled "Straw Into Gold." As a fairly new convert to spinning, it caught my interest—and it reminded me of one of my pet peeves where "spinning and fairy tales" is concerned.
Full disclosure: I let my fascination with "Sleeping Beauty"—my favorite fairy tale—led me down the garden path into learning to spin. First it was a drop spindle, then a little castle wheel, and now I own an old Ashford Traditional, which is one of those really classic items that look exactly like what you'd expect to see when you hear "spinning wheel." You know, a big flywheel; a treadle; a thing that whizzes around; sharp pointy bits sticking out at every angle for unwary princesses to prick their fingers on and fall into hundred-year sleeps...
Actually, no. My spinning wheel, which is one of the earliest iterations of this model of wheel, has no pointy bits on it anywhere. None. Zero. Nada. It does have the flywheel and the treadle and the thing that whizzes around, though. The latter item is called the flyer, and it contains, right in its center, the spindle. Which, on this kind of wheel, is a hollow tube. Did I mention "no pointy bits"?
So what, then, did the princess prick her finger on?
That's the million-dollar question, isn't it. The princess pricked her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel, and... Hold on. Where did you get that idea?
Let me guess: from a movie. For example, the 1959 Disney cartoon. Or the 2014 remake thereof, Maleficent. Or its 2019 sequel. All of which are prime examples of the aforementioned pet peeve of mine: the utter lack of research that seems to have gone into the "spinning" part of filming stories that are centered on, well, spinning. I can forgive the 1959 cartoonists - they didn't have the power of Google to assist them. But the 2014 film makers? Puh-lease. Five minutes on the Internet would have told them that a real spinning wheel does not have sharp spikes poking out of the top. I have no idea what that princess-pricking thing in the Disney films is supposed to be; obviously, we're dealing with a cursed magical object here, because it has no purpose whatsoever in real spinning.
Moreover, five minutes of reading the "original" versions of "Sleeping Beauty" (by which I mean the tales as they were originally written down by Perrault and the Brothers Grimm) would have told the filmmakers that the tales don't even mention a spinning wheel. "The princess should have her hand pierced with a spindle," they say, and in the Grimms, when the princess encounters the spinning old woman in the tower, she asks her, "What is that thing that is so merrily bouncing about?" Then she takes "hold of the spindle" and, well, you know the rest. All of which clearly says that the spindle in question is a hand spindle, not one set in a spinning wheel.
"Rumpelstiltskin" films are no better on the spinning-research front. Rumpelstiltskin definitely uses a spinning wheel, not a hand spindle: the miller's daughter is given "a spinning wheel and a reel" for spinning straw into gold, and when the mannikin sits down to fulfil the task, the wheel goes "whir, whir, whir," and the bobbin is full (the original tellers of the tales knew exactly what a spinning wheel in full motion sounds like). However, in the films, once again nobody seems to bother doing any research on how spinning is actually done, not even enough to have the actors pretend convincingly. I've seen actors pull the yarn off the bobbin instead of feeding it on, have Rumpelstiltskin poking a piece of straw at the wheel as if he's trying to tickle the poor thing into submission, or just randomly pitch straw in the direction of the wheel where it precipitates out onto the bobbin as gold (no doubt occasioned by the static the turn of the flywheel generates).
I mean, come on! How hard can it be to watch a few Youtube videos on what spinning looks like? Or figure out what the parts of a spinning wheel actually are and what they're used for? If you insist on having Sleeping Beauty prick her finger on a spinning wheel rather than a hand spindle, at least make it a wheel with a quill spindle instead of a flyer assembly. They're rare, but they do exist; I could even buy such a spindle for my Ashford Traditional, and a wicked-sharp-looking thing it is too.
Somehow, that lack of research into spinning seems to me an indication of a lack of respect for this ancient craft. For millennia, spinning was the driving force of civilization. Every inch of thread, every square centimeter of cloth originated from a woman's spindle or wheel (and yes, it was primarily women who did the spinning). Every piece of clothing, every blanket, every sail on every sailing ship exploring the high seas—they all started with spinning. Spinning, spinning, spinning, all day long and into the night. Is it any wonder that some of our most beloved stories, the ones that everyone knows, that are told over and over again, center around the craft of spinning? The least we could do is honor it when we're spinning a new yarn of a retelling of those fairy tales.
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All images by A.M. Offenwanger. The first one is of Angelika’s spinning wheel at rest. The second is of the wheel in action, and the third is of her flax distaff and spindle.
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Bio: Angelika is a reader, writer, blogger, and editor who has loved fairy tales and folklore from the time she was a little girl—so much so that when she was grown, she wrote a master’s thesis on them. Her favorite stories to read, write and study are those set in other worlds, whether that’s fantastical worlds full of magic, far-off places, or long-gone times.
Follow her blog at www.amovitam.ca or on Twitter @amoffenwanger